One of the key reasons the internet was invented was to increase the possibility of sharing ideas. As an engineer, with an interest in pure science, I have never been happy with pay walls. I understand the need to keep certain information confidential, my company has its own NDA (Non Disclosure Agreement) but there is a clear distinction between pure science and business.

If I make a technical discovery then yes I should be able to patent the idea and have exclusive use of it for a limited time. But, without the “shoulders of giants” I have stood on I would not be where I am now. We need a reasonable time-frame to exploit our ideas so we benefit from them but if we don’t publish them eventually who’s shoulders will the next generation of engineers and scientist stand on (Original quote: Sir Issac Newton), since quoted by Stephen Hawking

I’ve recently had the experience of shoulder surfing my partner’s 3 year old niece whilst watching youtube videos on her parent’s mobile device. It seemed like she got some kind of gratification watching a video for a few minutes (probably enough to register as a view, I’d guess?) then scrolling down and picking the most interesting looking thumbnail. Adverts are fully tolerated and even sometimes not skipped. The concerning thing I found was you start off with a bootleg legitimate Peppa Pig episode, and within about 5-10 minutes you’re stuck in this hellish loop of videos where adults are playing and unpacking toys and talking complete utter bollocks in kinda creepy voices, or the “auto-generated” videos. Once you’re in that hell you the recommendations get weirder and weirder.

Her parents aren’t computer savvy enough for enforcing parental controls (thinking screen pinning, and youtube’s “safety” features). I flipped them on and unsurprisingly many of the videos kept showing up.

The few I’ve seen I’m not entirely sure they’ve been auto-generated. Maybe created by someone who doesnt speak the native language, doesnt have kids, and works in sweat shop environments for someone trying to game the YouTube recommendation and monetisation system by exploiting the behaviour that young children seem to have for video hopping.

[…] within about 5-10 minutes you’re stuck in this hellish loop of videos where adults are playing and unpacking toys and talking complete utter bollocks in kinda creepy voices, or the “auto-generated” videos. Once you’re in that hell you the recommendations get weirder and weirder.

AOL making all that money on dial-up. I can’t remember where I heard it, but apparently almost all of it comes from Point Of Sale terminals. I expect those newsagents that want to accept Visa will probably end up going Square + Cheap Android + GiffGaff before too long.

Second: Firefox Add-ons.

Disclosure: I work for Mozilla, but not on Extensions, or Quantum.

When the addons API first came about, it was really just a very thin veneer on top of the implementation details of XUL and the internals Firefox. This made it large and extremely powerful, but also made the add-ons API — and thus the add-ons themselves — a massive attack surface for the whole browser. More importantly, it became a huge drag on changing the internals: whether to [move to a multi-process model, optimize Gecko or update the UI.

The change was quite a bit about standardizing the extensions model, but mostly — I think — about giving the Firefox team head room for increasingly ambitious optimizations.

The new WebExtensions API is sane, and largely Chrome compatible. More APIs are being added — the teams are soliciting for APIs to expose — but in a considered manner designed not to back the browser into a corner in the future.

Jono and Stuart understanding of the tech is at the same level as my dog has about the TV remote … I think Jeremy gets it.

Please get someone to explain basics of blockchain and cryptocurrency to You and your listeners, I’d suggest contacting Andreas Antonopoulos - he is real good at keeping it ELI5; or at least do a browse thru his lectures an Q&A on YouTube …

I don’t know why the settings are the way they are, but hardware acceleration is blocked by platform on Linux. You have to go to the about:config page to re-enable it. I don’t know why, but it’s silly. The flag you have to search for to enable it is: layers.acceleration.force-enabled

Ubuntu ships with an extension that disabled multi-threading last time I checked. The whole Electrolysis thing! It’s really bad, and they should not do that. Huge bug! I hope it’s disabled automatically now with Firefox 57 disabling old extensions. Or that it will be fixed some day.

Client side decorations look great! I don’t know if that’s for Ubuntu too, because I noticed Firefox on Fedora looks specifically built for Fedora, instead of coming from Mozilla itself. The flag for that is: widget.allow-client-side-decoration

I always used Chrome but I tried Firefox recently because of all the hype around it, and I am liking it! It feels snappy, except for the horrid smooth scrolling option enabled by default. Does anyone here use that?

Well, you should learn - at least about blockchain … unfortunately it will be everywhere

Exactly precisely the reason I haven’t learned is that I’m not at all convinced of that. I think either Jono or I said in the show that it seems like it might be a fad, and I still kinda think that. (Not sure of that, certainly.) And Jeremy mentioned how crazy volatile it all is…

blockchain as a concept most definitely is a fad, but when the tech gets deployed and used in corporate world it will be there “forever” - we will not be able to get rid of it; it will be the COBOL of this generation …

The mentioned volatility is in regards to Bitcoin, the crypto-currency. They are tightly linked but many (like IBM & Microsoft) think that you don’t need currency for the tech to work.